Regardless of who got played in the deal (read: small investors, as usual), the market is actually responding appropriately to Facebook’s current situation: the site is be a behemoth of traffic and attention, a platform underlying the very fabric of the Web, and an indispensable part of the lives of millions, but that doesn’t meant it’s safe. Sure, Facebook has conquered the Web, but the Web as we know it may be a dying medium. The Facebook killer won’t be a Website at all: it’ll be born mobile, just like the generation who will use it.

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Traffic from mobile devices is growing at an astounding rate — by some estimates, mobile visits now account for fully 20 percent of Web traffic. Every measure of mobile growth borders on exponential: Cisco estimates that global mobile data traffic will increase 18 times over between 2011 and 2016, the amount of mobile data consumed will go up 17-fold in the same time frame; mobile video will account for 70 percent of mobile traffic by 2016, 25 times more than in 2011. Global mobile data traffic more than doubled in 2011, for the fourth year in a row.

As a User Experience designer, you can help employers shape the jobs they advertise. Educate them, and you pay it forward for the designers of the future.

Most hiring managers don’t understand the skills needed for great websites and web applications because the field is still relatively new. They understand that skilled designers can lead to amazing successes (read: they want to be like Apple), but they don’t grasp what the process is, for or which skillset they should be hiring. It’s not entirely their fault.

User Experience still isn’t well defined (think of our industry as television when color first came out) so it’s especially hard to come up with a job description that’s still being written. Even most college programs are still in flux, meaning that some degrees in the field aren’t worth the paper on which they’re written.

As a User Experience designer, you can help employers shape the jobs they advertise. Educate them, and you pay it forward for the designers of the future.

What’s the Lay of the Land?

Reach out to other people at the company through social media channels to get their assessment.

During the interview process, ask a lot of questions:

How many developers do you have?

Do you have a visual designer?

Is there a front-end coder?

How big is the team?

Is there a product manager?

Have you had a UX designer before?

What’s your development process?

Is your team talking to the customers?

Who’s writing the requirements?

Are there requirements?

These questions give you clues about whether or not the organization has the right makeup for success, and whether you have the tools available to effect change. For example, if this is the first UX position among ten developers and the team lacks even a project manager, it probably won’t work.

Double down if a previous hire went sour. If they’ve had firsthand experience with one who’s spent two to three months there and couldn’t even deliver a wireframe, hiring managers become especially suspicious of people in the field.

Reach out to other people at the company through social media channels to get their assessment. This is a very effective way to find out if User Experience will work there, because you can make judgments on more than just the hiring manager’s viewpoint.

I love his bit about his life goals as a “mountain,” and his mission to do only work that would bring him closer to the mountain. Of course, we should all be so lucky to work only when jobs are adventurous and stop when they become work, but there are some wonderful nuggets of artistic wisdom throughout Gaiman’s speech.

A/B Tests are great if you’re focused on the right issues. However, many teams focus on the wrong problem. Even worse, they’ll focus on the wrong concept altogether, opting for incremental improvements instead of dramatic changes for the better.

More often than not, A/B tests are used to are a dog and pony show for the executives than to solve real problems.

In our study, we watched more than a dozen of the presenters’ company’s own customers attempt to buy products. While many were successful, a surprising number weren’t, even though this company is the biggest in its industry (and hailed by many as the most successful). Their site looks slick, but when folks sat down to use it for its primary goal, it’s design put up a ton of frustrating obstacles.

In many cases, the users thought they ordered the product they wanted, only to discover upon receipt that it wasn’t at all what they wanted. As we watched those shoppers make their orders, we could see that they would not get what they wanted.

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The A/B tests they presented showed they were applying a ton of effort to optimize things that weren’t close to the things we saw preventing sales on their site. If the message was that A/B testing helps, I didn’t get that because I saw them futzing around with tweaking insignificant button text when there were huge deficiencies in the design that they still haven’t resolved.

One of the most important things about any job search is knowing the companies that you are applying to. Jessica Greco has crafted a great post about researching your way into a new UX Job. Some very good points:

Research comparable jobs. If you’re the type to take on more responsibilities as they become necessary, you may be working at a higher level than your title indicates. Apply those research skills to publicly available job descriptions and salary surveys. How does your experience compare? You may be surprised to find out you’re being underpaid. Check out the data on DesignSalaries.org for information to sink your teeth into.

Prioritize your needs and wants. Is money most crucial, or do you have some wiggle room? Is it more important to be part of a team, or to work on more diverse projects? Do you want to work more closely with developers? Are you focused on making new connections, so you can eventually go freelance? Do you want to be part of a growing team that can provide you with a future management position?

Be honest with yourself. What’s essential, and what’s just nice to have? What do you really want out of your future? Any indecision on your part will effect lackluster results. Try to articulate what you really want before you begin your job hunt.

I’m offering the Usability Counts UX Resume Template in Microsoft Word format. It includes comments and annotations to give you tips on how to write your resume.

You also get a list of 30 other recommended articles for developing your User Experience career. It might not get you a job right away, but it should give you ideas on how to better structure your career history and accomplishments. You just have to fill out a 30-second form.

I’ll be involved an event where we give you tips on how to write your resume, and interview for great UX Jobs. We may contact you to see if you’re interested, and for no other purpose.

I promise I won’t spam you with Luxury Watch advertisements or sell your email address to Jared Spool. Just download the UX Drinking Game to make me feel better.

Very timely survey. Organizational challenges seem to loom over everything we do. I find myself designing things that never get built, or things that get built but never implemented, or being left out of the process entirely and seeing things implemented that have never been designed.

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Our relatively new UX team is struggling to settle into a comfortable rhythm of working. And it’s been a challenge to not only sell UX to other departments, but also to develop a process for assigning UX resources to projects. Top management is committed to UX being a key market differentiator for us, though, so I feel confident we’ll get there.

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I have been in a UX role in two differently styled operations, each with its share of frustrations: in an agency we were afraid to produce anything that wasn’t “perfect” and in a product app startup we push new code so fast that nothing gets built to spec. I think experience lives in a world between those two extremes (engineers and business) and it is a delicate balance rarely seen in practice.

The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over all. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.

A big problem with self design is that it doesn’t deal with things that you won’t do frequently with the design. One of those things is using the design for the first time, because, well, you can only do that once.

You see this in a lot of self-designed products: the initial user experience is rough, never explaining why you’d use any of the key functions, and hardly ever giving the user a great way to get started. Because self-designers rarely are working from a blank slate, the initial process of populating the application with data is not as smooth as the usage patterns once you get going. The entire getting-started process is really difficult.

We’ve scheduled this — holding a free workshop for UX Designers to help them build their resume, provide education on how to use social media to engage with great companies, and meet potential employers to learn of opportunities. It would be a short workshop (2 to 3 hours), but after designers would have the tools they needed to get a great job.

What would you like to see?

And of course, there would be a happy hour where any designer could come check out the opportunities.

So I’m glad to see social is making the jump from consumer to enterprise, because social platforms that take convesations in context are more effective communication channels. How many times have you searched for that email thread you weren’t on?

Our entire company is sharing on a constant basis. Important files, observations, questions answered — all shared in a way that everyone can see and reference. I can jump in and provide feedback and ideas, interacting with all parts of my team in real-time, and so can the rest of the company. We have even included our customers in this line of communication. We recently held a meeting with our largest customers and used a Chatter group to solicit content and planning ideas for the event. It was a fantastic meeting and the agenda was spot on. Chatter and similar technologies facilitate amazing collaboration and visibility.

A great organizational culture is a necessity if we are to create great products.

Being a UX professional—whether a UX designer, a user researcher, or a UX leader—can sometimes be challenging. We often find ourselves in the midst of organizational challenges—sometimes bringing more to light than we actually solve. Because our work is customer facing, User Experience is an important part of the product development equation. We reflect our organizational cultures because we are so integral to the product development process.

In many organizations, there is a very high turnover rate for Directors of User Experience—just because an organization’s culture is broken. We recognize early on that many product problems are a direct reflection of cultural difficulties, but sometimes there is no way to change them.

A great organizational culture is a necessity if we are to create great products. In this article, I’ll discuss some ways in which organizations fail because of their cultures.

Talking to Customers Isn’t a Part of an Organization’s Culture

“No matter what your process is, your organization’s goal should be to have a clear understanding of your customers.”

Instead of finding out what customers really need, a product team goes off in a room where a lot of smart people start developing use cases, wireframes, and visual designs in a conference room. Months go by, the organization releases the final product, and it bombs. No one uses it, a lot of money has gotten wasted, and the product team gets fired.

Whose fault is it? It’s the organization’s fault.

No matter what your process is, your organization’s goal should be to have a clear understanding of your customers. This means customer visits or remote user interviews using Skype video and screen sharing or simple phone calls. If you fit the profile of the target audience, you can design for yourself, but beware of doing this if you don’t belong to the audience for a product.

There is no excuse for this organizational failing; no one should design a product in a vacuum. The assertion that “we shouldn’t show customers the product because competitors might see it” is stupid. If you’re creating a new product like design a wedding gown for which the barrier of entry is so low that a customer could steal the idea, maybe you shouldn’t be in that market.

Great organizations have a clear vision for customers. Your organization should work hand in hand with customers. This is an issue of organizational culture. It should be ingrained in your culture that talking to users is not only expected, but rewarded.

Manufacturers of physical products do extensive studies of their customers to maximize their profits. Supermarket store design is a great example of this, particularly the design of customer flows. Why don’t technology firms do this?

How to avoid this failing—Go on the road. Visit or talk to at least one customer a week. Users are your best subjects, from whom you can learn the most. Partner with your customers to grow your business.

Leadership Doesn’t Have a Clear Vision

If a company’s direction is always changing, and they don’t have a clear vision of where they are going, there’s no way that they can build great products.

“This week we’re going to build a product with viral features.”

“This week let’s build a comment system.”

“This week we’ll do e-commerce!”

If a company’s direction is always changing, and they don’t have a clear vision of where they are going, there’s no way that they can build great products. Achieving successful product management and user experience is highly dependent on understanding the context of the user. If that context is always changing, there’s no way to build an effective user experience.

Vision is hard to define, but not as hard as you might think. There’s an anecdote about a couple of MBAs who started a business. They did extensive research and pricing studies and spent lots of money on ever-changing priorities. Eventually, they sold the company to a small business owner who had a simplified vision of how to run the company. Under the new leadership, the company sold its products for twice as much as they cost and provided great customer service. The business became wildly successful.

Creating great products isn’t as hard as you might think: becoming clear about what you’re providing to users is about listening to them. That’s it.

How to avoid this failing—Articulate a vision, and stick to it. You may need to adjust your vision based on market changes, but the clearer your vision, the better you’re able to build products that reflect that vision.

Leadership and the Design Team Don’t Share the Same Vision

If leadership doesn’t believe their design team can build a product that can grow the business, they need to make changes to the design team.

I’ve worked in a few organizations where we’d be making great progress on a product and getting really close to launch. Then we’d be asked to do a big demonstration for a Vice President or C-level executive, and our meeting would turn from strategy to “could you make this button green.” Or they might ask us to add a few more features that require a complete redesign, destroying months of work.

I’ve seen email messages from CEOs who were intent on hijacking the design process or going around design leadership to ask their go-to guy to make changes to a product design. This is toxic behavior and reflects poorly on leadership because it demonstrates that they have failed to build a design team that they can work with effectively.

If leadership doesn’t believe their design team can build a product that can grow the business, they need to make changes to the design team, not ask for a button in another color. The best designers work hand in hand with management to understand their vision and translate it into a viable product. If management can’t articulate a vision that is consistent with the needs of the market, this creates great conflict.

In truly great organizations, vision bubbles up from the lowest levels, then management synthesizes and articulates a clear product vision.

How to avoid this failing—Management must let designers do their job and recognize that they aren’t the target audience. Leaders’ responsibility is setting the vision and building their team. If they’ve done this right, they shouldn’t have to hijack the design process.

The Design Team Hasn’t Laid a Sound Foundation by Establishing a Design Process

A good process ensures consistency across all of your products and drives you toward a consistent product vision for your users.

“Let’s go straight to wireframes.”

Sometimes that might not be such a bad thing. You might need to get a feel for where you need to go by creating a bunch of wireframes. But wireframes are the end-product of a lot of other UX design tasks and are just one part of the design process. They provide documentation for your design projects, allow you to articulate your design ideas visually and functionally, and let you communicate your ideas to multiple audiences, including management and engineering.

I’ve seen design teams fail because there wasn’t a good foundation for the final design vision. Good designers should have at least a rough idea of where they are going, even if their destination could change.

A good process ensures consistency across all of your products and drives you toward a consistent product vision for your users.

The Designers on a Team Aren’t on the Same Page

Creating a collaborative culture is very important when building a design team. When designers work together they can achieve great things.

There’s nothing more toxic than when the designers on a team are working toward different goals. Creating a collaborative culture is very important when building a design team. When designers work together they can achieve great things. When they don’t agree on a design process or share the same design goals, arguments can ensue over the silliest things—like the color of buttons or the usage of hyperlinks. Such a team cannot achieve a consistent product vision.

I’ve worked with visual designers who refused to collaborate or whose idea of design was to throw mockups over a wall. In one particular environment where I worked, the visual designers completely changed the layouts and, thus, the workflows represented in the wireframes, disregarding the deep thought that had gone into the work.

While the personalities of the designers on a team may be very different, they should be able to work together toward one common goal: the success of their company. Here’s an example of teamwork from the world of baseball: During the early 1970’s, the Oakland As were a complete mess off the field because of personality differences. But on the field, they had one goal: winning the World Series. And they did win it three years straight, in 1972, 1973, and 1974.

How to avoid this failing—Design leadership should be able build a team that is on the same page and has shared goals. Sometimes that means firing people. Design is sometimes more subjective than we would like to think. Having an inconsistent design culture can destroy companies.

An Organization Doesn’t Allocate Its Resources Properly

Many organizations believe that the answer to building great engineering and product teams is to hire more engineers. I’ve found the opposite to be true.

Look at the product teams around you. How many product managers do you work with? How many designers? How many engineers?

Many organizations believe that the answer to building great engineering and product teams is to hire more engineers. I’ve found the opposite to be true. I’ve worked on a lot of smaller teams that were able to build great products by following streamlined processes, maintaining proper staffing levels, and hiring resources with the right skill sets.

I’ll give you an example: the best team I ever worked on had a ratio of three developers, one visual designer, one product manager—that was me—and one quality assurance engineer. We were able to do enough requirements gathering to keep the developers busy, no one worked overtime, and we created a product that is still profitable today as a small business.

If the ratios or skill sets of resources aren’t right, a team cannot work efficiently. When there are too few designers, developers sit around waiting, with nothing to do, and the designers are grossly overworked. When there are too many designers, they produce too much documentation, so the developers don’t know where to start. Finding the right balance is like tuning the engine of a racing car: too much or too little and the engine runs inefficiently. Getting the right mix means winning the race.

How to avoid this failing—Adjust your staffing levels and their skill sets for optimal performance. This doesn’t necessarily mean hiring more people: sometimes too many cooks in the kitchen can spoil the broth. Get the ratios right and your team’s performance will improve.

An Organization Encourages Feature Creep

Product management should work hand in hand with user experience. They should work together not only to decide what should be in a product, but also what shouldn’t be in a product.

Product management should work hand in hand with user experience. They should work together not only to decide what should be in a product, but also what shouldn’t be in a product. Most product teams don’t have the luxury of doing green-field product development with unlimited budgets. Therefore, feature creep can kill companies.

Constraints are our friends. We shouldn’t have to try to “ice skate in a phone booth,” but great teams realize the limitations and constraints of their environment and work within them. That’s the core of designing for mobile first: understand exactly what a user’s minimum needs are, then build a product to satisfy them. That’s one of the core premises of agile development: iterate to a final product within the constraints of your organization. If you force hard decisions, you’ll end up with a better product.

Poor product teams and UX teams don’t understand restraint, and they suffer because of this. Projects are rushed, wireframes undergo endless revisions, and nothing ever gets done at a level of quality that anyone is happy with. It’s in everyone’s best interest to focus on what you can do rather than some mythical and unachievable goal.

How to avoid this failing—Less is more. Iterate to a final product. Every feature that you include should provide tremendous value and be integral to the user experience. If leadership consistently asks product teams and designers to add features or make fundamental changes to a product within an unrealistic timeline, the organization’s culture needs to change.

There’s No Effort Dedicated to Fit and Finish

The fit and finish of a product … reflects directly on the team that built a product.

Would you try to sell a car with a half-finished paint job? Only three seats in the cabin? A dashboard that wasn’t cleaned?

That’s the rub: users will continually expect better and better user experiences as the Web matures. This includes the fit and finish of a product, which reflects directly on the team that built a product. Apple goes to great lengths to build products that feel complete. Most companies don’t produce products at that level, and the market reacts appropriately, declaring such products to be commodities.

Lack of attention to the details of a product reflects directly on how organizations perceive the expectations of their customers. An example: For many years, American automakers weren’t dedicated to the goal of refining the fit and finish of their products, and their customers reacted accordingly.

You must take the greatest care from the initial design of the user experience to the final implementation of its details. Customers notice when a product team doesn’t take the time to take it all the way to the finish line.

How to avoid this failing—Emphasize the expectation that your organization should be dedicated to producing products to the highest standards. Making sure a product goes out with every detail complete should always trump deadlines or any political concerns.